WWI Animals: Elephants on Parade

Imagine, elephants played a role in Britain during World War I.

At the start of the war, the British army had 25,000 horses that were used for everything. The leaders quickly estimated they’d need another 500,00 horses for the army.

To that end, horses were requisitioned all over the country. Rural areas like Sussex and Surrey on the southern coast were most affected by the depletion of their farming stock.

With the able-bodied men also gone to war, this left farming in the hands of women, children and elderly men.

Mechanical means were not available, popular or even invented 100 years ago. Much of the food production in England during that time was done using draft animals.

No horses. Economies ground to a halt. Food became an issue and rationing began.

Food needs

Ange Greenwood explains in his article Sheffield Jungle:

“Restrictions on travel, rations on food and fuel, and general black-outs to avoid being spotted by the first zeppelin raids sent over by the enemy meant that many show-families retired to wintering quarters. In addition, many young showmen and engine drivers were called up for war service.”

Along with farms, circuses, menageries, and zoos also had trouble feeding their livestock.

A properly harnessed elephant could pull the equivalent of four or five draft horses, meaning they could put be to the plow.

Some circuses sold their elephants, some saw them requisitioned. They were put to necessary war work.

Circus performers

W. S. Meadmore mourned the effect of the war on the circuses in a 1937 article in The Circus Book:

“The war nearly killed the traveling circus, it certainly killed the old-fashioned Parade. Modern traffic conditions forbade its slow progress through over-crowded streets.

During the war the gilt was scraped from the surviving Sanger tableau wagons and sold for a few hundred pounds. The wagons, with their wonderful carvings, now stand neglected in the fields of the Sanger winter quarters at Horley, rotting to pieces, each year sinking lower and lower in the ruts they have made for themselves in the hedgerows.”

Lord John Sanger’s circus had four elephants at the start of the war: Ida, Annie, Tiny and Jennie. They became farming animals and were used to plow the fields and haul food to market.

Alan Reid of the Horley Historical Society (The Lord John Sanger circus went to the countryside surrounding Horley) noted the elephants

 “were used for a practical purpose, but it was probably a good bit of publicity for the circus too . . . About 30 years ago a bungalow was built where the animals were kept and builders found remains of what they thought was a woolly mammoth. The story was spoiled when they found out it was an elephant.”

An elephant named Lizzie

Lizzie, an elephant in Sedgwick’s Menagerie before the war was sold to the T. W. Ward Company to move scrap metal. As she was strong enough to do the work of three horses, Lizzie hauled upwards of 1000 tons of metal a day through the streets of Sheffield for recycling.

To ease the possible wear on her feet, Lizzie was outfitted with a type of leather shoe.

Lizzie was popular with the folks living in Sheffield and a number of stories abound of her comforting school children who didn’t have a snack for her, helping herself to fruit off trees and even pushing a truck when needed.

No one seems to know what became of her after the war.

Tiny and Ida went to the Bellevue Circus and Annie and Jennie returned to circus work following the war’s end. Annie and Jennie performed an “act” of plowing in the circus until they retired in 1941.

Elephants were used during the war to do the jobs needed but also to encourage the British people. Crops need to be sown and harvested, otherwise, people would starve.

Their work was a message that the whole country was together in fighting the war,  and everything was used to try to win it.

British Pathe recently released a large number of films from the WWI era. Here’s a short two-minute homage to the animals who served during WWI.

Tweetables

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